Out of Canon and Fiction
by Shadowed Mediocrity
Summary: An odd dialogue between two people. What might happen behind the scenes of a fanfiction being written.


Out of Canon and Fiction

**_Author's Note: _**This spin-off was **inspired** by Dillpops, who asked The Question. This is The Answer – of sorts. **I do not own Shaman King**, although I claim the portrayal of the characters and the creation of this dimension as my own.

If you don't realize who the characters are, then I'm not doing my job properly. Enjoy if you can.

* * *

The fire roared up as she approached, luminescent tongues that sparked as they struck the bricks of the fireplace and subsided again into quiet, angry activity. He did not look up as she came, but went on watching the conflagration tranquilly, his fingers hovering over the rim of a wineglass as they lazily stirred a note from its pristine surface with a slow, circling motion.

She looked like nothingness; her shape shifted, flickered as though she were an uncertain hologram whose appearance had not yet been determined. Now she was tall, now short, diminutive and large and all shades of skin at once. As she hedged towards the end of the chair opposite his, her hair and eyes went black, glasses to mask her expression and slide down her nose, and did not change again.

Hao watched the flames narrowly. As if she did not see it, she held herself stiffly for a moment, head bowed, shoulders angular and tense. Her fingers wrapped whitely about a flat, rectangular object, ubiquitous and vague in its identity and shape.

"Sit down," He said pleasantly at last, though he did not glance up to her. "You don't have to act like Anna, for all you try hard to write her as she ought to be."

She sat, grimly.

"Look," she said. It was uncomfortably warm within the room; was it simply her, him, or something else entirely? She raised her head so that the sparks of light glittered off her hair like pinpoint stars. "if this is about the plotline—"

He turned to look at her as she spoke. Her voice trailed away into silence before she even grasped that realization; his eyes were full of flames, flaring like the embers of dying stars. Then, gradually, he smiled the smile of a cat, teeth faintly pointed as he drew his fingers in an extravagant motion across the tray of tiny pastries that had appeared upon the table at her arrival. "Do you want anything to eat?"

Her look was wary, and she gave a quick jerk of a shake from side to side. Her back prickled with cold and edged heat at once. "No."

"So guarded?" His smile was widely amused. He tilted his head to the side, smile vanishing in a brief, flickering instant as he regarded her owlishly. "They're not poisoned. You should know that very well. Didn't you make it so?"

"Don't toy with me." She said, laboriously, as though each word weighed upon her tongue. "You know that I need you."

"Ah, but of course." Now the other side of his mouth tipped up in a bland expression. "Your—fanfiction."

"Don't say it like that."

"And why not?" He drew back into his high-backed chair; the wood was patterned with scars of intricate designs like claws, as though some animal with pretensions of art had sought to make it into something that it was not. His gaze was veiled, but no less disdainfully tolerant. "Didn't you say it yourself a while ago? How much time has it been, truly, since you said that? Since you said, oh what was it—"

"Stop it." Her grip about the laptop tightened; her features went alternately white and flushed with crimson at once, so that she sat like a painted doll in the chair opposite his before the fireplace. Against the rigid bone-white of her complexion, the black of her eyes was huge and encompassing. "Stop it, I took it back, I'm sorry—"

"Sorry?" He repeated the word musingly, as though he had never encountered it before. Then he smiled the smile of a feline. "You've said that before. Shortly before you took your name. Lasakura; a drawled _l'Asakura_, French for The Asakura. Shortly before you mentioned that which we are in this dimension belongs to you anyway, and you can do whatever you like."

"Pretentious, I know." She said wretchedly, hunching her shoulders together as if she wanted to wither away where his slowly amused gaze touched her.

"No," he said simply. His eyes were half-hooded as he turned to glance at his half-crooked fingers, and watched as a tiny ball of flame wavered into existence on his palm. "Fitting. Someone with this much power over us _should_ bear our name, if only to keep it within the family." His tone was light, and not a little scornful, though he was careful not to appear so; the picture of courtesy, this boy like a gentleman with a burning flame in his hand.

Abruptly, at the far end of the room new light flickered in as a boy burst into the room. "Hao!" Then, he stopped, sandaled feet skidding to a halt as he noticed the presence of the visitor. His eyes, normally light with warmth, went hooded and flat. "Oh." He said, impassively, careful not to look at her. "I didn't realize that you had – company." He turned towards the door.

She started up and rose after him, a hand held out instinctively. "Yoh—"

"Don't call me that." He glanced back, and she saw in that instant what was in Hao, what was in him; a burning like madness driven by the capability to kill. But that was tempered, muted because it was Yoh that bore it, and Yoh did not want the burden of death on his hands.

Even hers.

"I'm sorry." She said fretfully, in a low voice. "I didn't realize that it hurt you so much."

Now he did turn to face her. His eyes were black like her own, but reflective; she could read them no more than she could understand the mind behind her mirror.

"You didn't realize." The shaman repeated, smiling in his quiet, dull way. "You didn't realize that taking us to another world, hurting Anna, giving us years of memories that were never ours to have. That would never hurt me, would it? Breaking the hearts of everyone I know, and bringing us to a world where I couldn't hurt you for it; where no one could."

"_Yoh_." She said again, and might have said more, but he turned away. The headphones hooked over his head sang a low, sweet note that echoed and lingered in the darkness.

"I want to talk to you." He said to his brother – watching by the fire – over the angled line of his shoulder. "Call me when she's gone."

He left.

"Did you expect him to say anything else?" Hao said amusedly at the fire. He had sprawled comfortably over the wooden curves of his seat as she turned her reluctant gaze back to him, and looked at ease as she could never be. "He knew, of course, even in canon, that Tamao was in love with him. And here you have to go and accessorize the situation so that it complicates by itself. He's easygoing, but hardly enough to forgive that much."

"But it's only a—" She began.

"A _story_?" said Hao. Like a snake he moved, with the same whiplike speed that drew his face two inches away from hers, black on black and bright with something like hatred, if Hao could hate.

"Do we feel like a story to you?" He whispered. The words flew as though they had wings; struck her mouth with a force that went beyond the comprehensible. She staggered and he put his hand at the small of her back to steady her and keep her close. "You should be pleased; Anna's outside putting up wards to keep _him_ out for the duration of the next few chapters. He thought that you were going to make him happy, you see. Keep him happy for the duration of this story, what with one thing and another, and finally having recovered her as he never could."

He guided her to her seat, his hip a steady support as he dropped her into the confines of her own chintz chair and returned to his own seat.

"Does he know yet?" She said numbly.

"Not yet." Hao selected a small truffle from the tray, scrutinized it a moment before allowing his tongue to trail over it in a slow, sensuous motion. "He will soon, though." He added, eyeing her. "After all, you already completed the next chapter; it shouldn't be difficult before he realizes exactly what he's holding and why."

"And you're protecting me." She said. The sight of him tilting his head back to allow the warmth of the sweet to slide down his throat made her swallow, hard, her knuckles whitening as she gripped her computer. "Why?"

The look in her eyes was so suspicious that for a moment he allowed himself to laugh at the sight of that glittering, hard light, that stiffening of her back as though she expected him to demand of her a price that she could not pay.

"There are reasons and there are reasons." He said, smiling. Gently, he returned his gaze to her. "I have desires, of course, but they won't come into play for a while. I've read your chapter outline, you see. I'm quite willing to wait."

She stared at him. His smile was too sweet, teeth as white as though he'd never touched a chocolate.

"You mean," she said, stupidly, "you want…"

"Of course." He spread his hands. "And in the meantime you may go on writing with my full support; they will not turn on you yet without that." The glitter within his eye was unmistakable; the tremulous light of a flamethrower.

"Ten million furyoku is a bit hard to forget." She agreed, although her gaze was dull still. "But—"

He was at her side again as she slumped back against the chair, and for a moment she felt the metal of his gloves and the warmth of his fingers clearly through the thin t-shirt that she wore as he gathered her up as if she weighed as little as a brittle-boned doll. "You have a fever?" He said amusedly. "In the middle of summer? It hardly seems likely."

"Shut up." She said dreamily. "A fever's a fever. What're you going to do, anyway? Burn me to death so that I won't feel it anymore?"

"Would you want me to?"

"Might be nice, might be nice." She conceded. "Feels terrible now."

She felt, rather than heard, the reverberating laugh that sounded out from the hollow at his throat. He passed his lips over her forehead in a gesture that might have been taken for affectionate, if not for the fact that she stiffened against it, and his eyes were glittering with a terrible light as he did so.

"This is what you wanted, isn't it?" He whispered at the curve of her ear. She felt the slide of sweat at her forehead, the knowledge that he was too close, too close…

"Ah well." He began to bear her from the room, pushing open the door to allow the sensible light of the house that Anna and Yoh dwelt into stream into the gloomy library room of Another Dimension. His voice was normal again, and that deadly smile had vanished. "I suppose we'll have to wait another chapter to find out what you wanted."

"Wtfzzfzz." She said coherently. And allowed the rest of her thoughts to trail down into darkness.

* * *

**Reviews:** are highly desired. I commend everyone who reviews, as I have suddenly gained a mad desire to have everyone who reads this to post, if only one or two lines, even as an anonymous reader. Quiet, I have always been strangely ambitious. This is hardly my fault.

**Author's Note**: As a matter of fact, I really do have a fever. It's strange and mad and here is the moral of the story: do not deal with pyromaniacs and fanfictions when you are running a fever. I feel that this is a moral worthy of having people live their lives by it.

I think this is a one-shot show of what generally happens before I write the next chapter. What do you think?


End file.
